Geolocation and Interactive Maps

Geolocation feature in a web browser is the key to improve the location-awareness of a web app. The following simple geolocation demo combines the information given by the browser with a textual geocoded address and a visual marker in a map.

Getting the approximate address is not difficult to achieved using Google Maps Reverse Geocoding API. In fact, this was exactly how I have done it in my previous geolocation example. Now, displaying the location itself is also not a difficult matter, one can simple use the ubiquitous Google Maps or the alternatives such as OpenStreetMap.

With the recent release of Leaflet 0.6, I finally found some extra motivation to show how to use it in this context. For the tile data itself, I decided to give CloudMade a try (you need to sign up to get the API key and enjoy 500,000 free tiles every month). It took only a few minutes to implement this feature, combining Leaflet and CloudMade, especially if you follow Leaflet’s Getting Started guide. Some relevant code fragment:

Using Leaftlet, the map also works well on a variety of mobile platforms, everything from Android smartphones to Chromebook Pixel. And yes, it understands touch API for smooth panning and zooming. It feels good when pinch-to-zoom just works!